Product Spotlight: The Planning of Rivers of Rhythm

This post is the second of a series about the planning, design, and development of The National Museum of African American Music’s digital exhibit: Rivers of Rhythm. In this post, product strategist Tomiko Peirano discusses the concepting and planning of the application, as well as the user testing process. The first post in the series can be found here.

The idea for the Rivers of Rhythm application was grounded in the client’s desire to illustrate the breadth and depth of American music, and how African American artists drove and shaped that history through an engaging digital exhibit. NMAAM wanted to show the on-going genealogy of our nation’s musical heritage prior to the museum’s opening — a powerful and exciting concept to bring to life.

We started with scribbles on the whiteboard — balancing big ideas with user persona needs, and the data we safely assumed we could get access to (keeping in mind what was plausible for the future product build). A user persona was crafted: the music lover. This user was a tech-savvy man or woman in their early 20’s who thrives on nuanced, obscure information, someone who may ask their friends, “Did you know that Aerosmith were actually big fans of Fats Waller…” (please don’t fact check me on that quip.)

Working with this persona in mind, we determined what we thought this user needed to see and hear in the application in order to “rabbit-hole” the concept, making the app addicting and easy for a user to get lost in. We identified features such as the ability to go on to a favorite artist’s page and see his or her influencers, their influencees, and so on. We also wanted to create interactive experiences throughout the product, and thus identified opportunities to incorporate audio, video, and text in as many views as we felt made sense for the end users, further adding to the “rabbit-hole” nature of the application.

Once the proof of concept Invision prototype was complete, NMAAM was equipped with a powerful marketing tool to begin raising sponsorship funds — and we had what we needed to conduct user testing to validate our concept. We put the prototype in front of unaware users via UserTesting.com. We collected great objective user feedback, found out what people expected on certain key pages, what surprised them (for good and bad), and how much explanatory content the application needed. For example, did our concept of influencers/influencees land with people? We assumed a learning curve for any new app, but we needed to see how many great decisions and missteps we had made.